The Solitary Gourmet (劇映画 孤独のグルメ, Yutaka Matsushige, 2024)

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Isn’t it funny how a good bowl of soup can make everything better? Based on the manga written by Masayuki Qusumi and illustrated by Jiro Taniguchi, the feature-length edition of the long-running series has a distinctly soupy feel as salaryman Goro (Yutaka Matsushige) finds himself travelling Japan and abroad in search for the ingredients of a soup an old man ate as a child. Airing since 2012, The Solitary Gourmet TV series was a trendsetter for Japanese comfort foodie cinema and has given rise to several other similarly themed shows in which the protagonist visits a real life establishment and enjoys whatever they have to offer from food to sake, sweets, and even traditional bathhouses.

In fact, there’s even a meta joke towards the end of Solitary Gourmet (劇映画 孤独のグルメ, Geki Eiga: Kodoku no Gourmet) in which one of the restaurants Goro goes to is featured in a show about a foodie salaryman while he plays a fellow customer. The newly international setting reflects the increased budget of a theatrical feature and also helps to expand the series’ episodic format in leading Goro on a crazy chase that begins with the daughter of an old friend in Paris (Anne Watanabe) who enlists him to hunt down the ingredients for her grandfather’s cherished soup. Of course, this provides an excuse for Goro to go to the remote Goto Islands and learn about the local cuisine while running around collecting random samples like he’s on a side quest in an RPG. 

Then again, it also offers him the chance for some surreal adventures, including getting cast away on an uninhabited island before being rescued by the Korean-speaking residents of a food research institute. It’s there that he meets Shiho (Yuki Uchida), a Japanese woman living on “an island for women who are fed up with men,” and a former restaurant worker retreating from a marriage fracturing under the pressures of trying to run a restaurant in the post-COVID society. When Goro later catches up with her husband (Joe Odagiri), he too is a depressed, broken figure who now only serves fried rice in his incredibly unwelcoming restaurant. But being talked into helping Goro recreate the old man’s beloved soup seems to reactivate his creative juices and give him the desire to get back on his feet. 

Star Yutaka Matsushige directing for the first time throws in a brief homage to Tampopo but what the film is most interested in is the universality and healing power of a tasty broth from the onion soup Goro eats in Paris to the Haejangguk, or hangover soup, that he orders in Korea while being watched over by an exasperated immigration officer (Yoo Jae-myung). That Goro’s quest takes him so far hints at the shared history of the two nations and the various culinary influences and universalities running between them with soup a means of healing and friendship. Exchanging a few words of Korean, Goro tries to ask what the name of the fish in his soup is, only to come to an understanding when the immigration officer writes it down for him in Chinese characters. 

All this food really does bring people together, as Goro gets pretty much everyone he meets roped into his quest to recreate the old man’s childhood dish as his deathbed request. Matsushige recreates the zany humour of the TV series including his familiar “I’m hungry” catchphrase, followed by the camera taking three steps back and picturing Goro in front of some notable landmark. He also doesn’t seem to be getting much work done while running around trying to figure out this soup even he’s never actually tasted it and is reliant on the old man’s fragile recollections. Goro had been in Paris to deliver a painting of somewhere he once lived and the old man remarked that photographs are records of time but painting turns them into memories. Food, or more specifically soup, might do something similar, at least according to the old man who is desperately trying to reclaim something of the home comforts of his youth. Of course, the old man is the only one who knows what the soup tastes like, so perhaps Goro is on a fool’s errand, but as he later says, soup does seem to be the water of life and thanks to its healing qualities a universal symbol of peace and harmony not to mention friendship and kindness.

The Solitary Gourmet screens 29th May as part of this year’s Nippon Connection.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Images: ©2025 “Solitary Gourmet” Film Partners

Missing Child Videotape (ミッシング・チャイルド・ビデオテープ, Ryota Kondo, 2024)

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“Now you’re it,” a little boy says, but in a game of hide and seek it can be difficult to tell the seeker from the sought. Inspired by classic J-horror, Ryota Kondo’s eerie debut feature Missing Child Videotape (ミッシング・チャイルド・ビデオテープ) takes the innate fear we have of things that are so old they surpass our understanding and couples it with a more psychological dread in which the heroes are quite literally haunted by their personal traumas.

The irony is that we first meet Keita saving a little boy lost in the forest, though he’s haunted by his failure to do the same for his younger brother Hinata who disappeared 13 years previously when they were both children. Keita’s mother regularly sends him VHS tapes of the day Hinata went missing he shot while playing with his father’s camera. Keita had been rude to his mother and seemingly resented his little brother tagging along behind him. He tells Hinata to go away, which he of course then does, never to be seen again. The boys somehow wander into a disused building where Keita suggests they play hide and seek, mostly so Hinata will go hide and stop bothering him. Catching sight of Hinata in a corridor, Keita tells him that he’s now “it” so it’s time to come look for him instead, but now he can’t find his brother anywhere. His rising panic is palpable from the terror in his voice to the increasing shakiness of the camera, even as it transitions into the mental state of the adult Keita as if the tape itself were on a constant loop in his mind. 

There is a suggestion that the boys are still playing hide and seek and that Hinata has also been trying to find his way back to his brother all this time. As for the now grown-up Keita, he’s fairly detached and on a surface level a little indifferent, still resenting his brother for seizing an eternal spotlight. He’s sick of everyone talking about it all the time and equally of the ambivalence of being the brother of the boy who disappeared, alternately pitied and suspected. He thinks his parents actually thought he probably killed Hinata but did nothing about it, while he always resented them anyway. Even as a child, it seemed apparent to him that they were only playing the roles of a family and none of it was “real”. In any case, he did not want to be forced into the role of big brother with all the responsibility that entails. 

To that extent, Keita is also a “missing child” and a man who is still a boy lost in a disused building that apparently never existed. His search for his brother is also a way of reclaiming himself and opening up to more complete human connections. The film is curiously ambiguous in its depiction of the relationship between Keita and Tsukasa, the man with whom he lives who has psychic abilities and is able to see ghosts and supernatural entities. Tsukasa tells the equally haunted reporter Mikoto that he’s “the person who lives with him,” but the pair otherwise behave more like a couple if one that seems content to let their secrets breathe.  

Nevertheless, Tsukasa comes to the conclusion that Keita is “under the influence of the mountain,” which as it turns out, has taken several more victims before and since Hinata’s disappearance. Another strange young man tries to warn Keita not to go back there, telling him a weird story about how his grandmother cannot really be his grandmother because of the ironic results of her sacrifice to the mountain gods. Indeed, this curse may reflect the lack of respect we’ve shown to the natural world as the mountain has become a dumping ground for unwanted things from bits of temples to a collection of funerary urns. Perhaps “unwanted” people are being thrown away there too, spirited away by the mountain and placed in some other realm. 

Kondo includes two kinds of tape each of which is imprinted with the psychic echoes of a traumatic event as Mikoto comes across a cassette recorded by students who also found the building that doesn’t exist, reflecting both the technological anxiety of classic J-horror along with the way that trauma replays and imprints itself on the present. Keita still appears to be haunted, and not least by himself as well as whatever did or didn’t happen the day his brother disappeared and the latent guilt he feels because of it. Playing hide and seek with himself, it seems that Hinata, and those he’s lost, may indeed have been with him all along, though both seeker and sought are apparently trapped within this infinite loop of fear and loneliness. 

Missing Child Videotape screens 28th May as part of this year’s Nippon Connection.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Images: ©2024 “Missing Child Videotape” Film Partners

Sweet Bean (あん, Naomi Kawase, 2015)

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Naomi Kawase has been a festival favourite since becoming the youngest Camera D’Or winner in 1997 with Suzaku, picking up the Grand Prix 10 years later with The Mourning Forest. Her work has however proved divisive with some decidedly unconvinced by her new age aesthetics and wilful obscurity. Set in suburban Tokyo rather than picturesque Nara, Sweet Bean sees Kawase for the first time working on a literary adaptation rather than her own original script, producing her most accessible and narratively straightforward work to date. 

The film opens with one of Kawase’s trademark handheld sequences that sees a dejected, middle-aged man trudge to work at a job he clearly hates and is perhaps not particularly good at. For reasons which will be explained later, Sentaro (Masatoshi Nagase) does not even like dorayaki but is currently the proprietor of a small, unsuccessful store selling them mainly to a group of irritatingly excitable teenage girls. One day, an old woman surprises him by responding to his help wanted sign. Despite clarifying there was no age restriction on the position, Sentaro turns her away with the gift of a free sample only she later returns and takes him to task. The pancakes were not too bad, she tells him, but the filing is intensely disappointing. Unbeknownst to Tokue (Kirin Kiki), Sentaro has been bulk buying the “an” sweet red been paste from a catering company. She’s been making an for over 50 years and has brought along a sample which Sentaro first bins in irritation but then thinks better of it, realising as he tastes some that Tokue is the real deal. 

As Tokue later says, she decided to approach the dorayaki shop after noticing the sadness in Sentaro’s eyes, wanting to ask him what it was that made him suffer. She remembers a time where her eyes were full of just that sadness, feeling a similar sense of hopeless imprisonment, in her case reflecting a fear that she would never again be able to walk through the outside world after being quarantined in facility for those suffering from Hansen’s disease when she was a teenager (the Leprosy Prevention Law was lifted only in 1996). Yet having suffered so much, as we later learn even denied the opportunity to become a mother because of her condition, 76-year-old Tokue is full of joy and positivity enjoying her life to its fullest while envying the “freedom” of the annoying trio of high school girls at the dorayaki store, sadly relating that at their age she dreamed of becoming a Japanese teacher reading poetry with her students, another dream denied. 

The other high school girl, Wakana (Kyara Uchida), who comes into the store just before closing so she can take home the rejected pancakes, is perhaps feeling equally constrained, is touched by Tokue’s tale because her own mother isn’t even keen for her to finish high school proclaiming that studying doesn’t put food on the table. The three of them generate an intergenerational friendship as Tokue begins transmitting her knowledge, painstakingly teaching Sentaro how to make “real” an, which as it turns out is an art which can’t be rushed. Seeing the world on a microlevel she communicates with the beans, “I always listen to the stories the beans tell” she explains, visualising the sun and rain and wind which brought them on the long journey to be a part of this bean paste, even going so far as to thank them for their service. As she tells Sentaro, “We all have our stories” realising it’s not perhaps yet time to hear his or share hers. Yet for all her positivity, “sometimes we are crushed by the ignorance of the world”. Tokue’s bean paste generates a lengthy queue outside the store, but custom dries up after a rumour gets round that the old lady who makes it is a leper. 

Like Tokue Sentaro too had once been isolated from the world, now burdened by guilt and obligation that perhaps make him cynical and aloof but is eventually touched by Tokue’s earnestness, not just her lust for life but the fact that she works hard and possesses great skill. His boss tells him to unceremoniously fire her, but he is struck by the unfairness of it all, that she’s still being discriminated against for nothing more than outdated prejudice. It’s her kindness and generosity of spirit which begins to show him the “sweetness” of life, finally converted to the charms of the dorayaki despite proclaiming himself not possessed of a sweet tooth. 

The protagonists of Kawase’s previous films often found spiritual release in traditional dance which is notably absent in the urbanised Sweet Bean, though the positivity perhaps extended more to finding accommodation with the sadness of life than actively embracing its joys. Tokue had in her own way freed herself and hoped that others could learn to do the same, urging both Sentaro and Wakana to find the confidence to follow their own paths while affirming that “we were born into this world to see and listen to it, I think whatever we become each of us has meaning in our lives”. A recognisably Kawaseian evocation of mono no aware shot against the cherry blossoms, Sweet Bean is uncharacteristically direct in message but even in its essential melodrama quietly moving in its awestruck love for the natural world and for the liberating power of simple human kindness as a path to existential happiness. 

Trailer (English subtitles)

Dorm (เด็กหอ, Songyos Sugmakanan, 2006)

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“Are you scared of ghosts?” one child asks another. Perhaps it’s an odd question. Ghosts are generally assumed to be frightening, but they can also in a way comfort though their presence may be painful. Songyos Sugmakanan’s poignant ghost story Dorm (เด็กหอ) casts the school at its centre as an infinitely haunted place, not just because of the associations it later takes on in the mind of the protagonist, but a prison-like space of emotional repression that nevertheless later becomes one of friendship and liberation.

It isn’t surprising that it feels like a prison to Chatree (Charlie Trairat) who has been abruptly sent there by his father (Suttipong Tudpitakkul) he feels as a kind of banishment for a very particular transgression. According to his father, however, it’s all because his school isn’t strict enough and Chatree spends too much time playing games and watching television. Intensely authoritarian, Chatree’s father soon alienates his son who bears intense resentment towards him not only for his severity and unwillingness to recognise his autonomy, but because of his failures as a father and eventually exiling of him because of the challenge he presents within this household. 

Further challenging notions of masculinity, Chatree’s father had told him that “a man must be able to live anywhere.” Though he had said the school had everything, the environment is grey and austere. Chatree is met by a rather cold woman, Pranee (Chintara Sukapatana), who takes him to the dorm where he will be sleeping which is in a large room with high ceilings and several rows of camp beds. Parnee cooly tells him that he’s expected to fend for himself, while his immediate neighbours proceed to haze him by telling him several ghost stories said to take place the school. Chatree’s school days continue in utter misery until he befriends Vichien (Sirachuch Chienthaworn), another lonely boy seemingly shunned by the others but as Chatree gradually realises actually a ghost unable to move on from the scene of his trauma just as Chatree is unable to move from his abandonment by his family. 

To that extent, the school is a kind of liminal place and it becomes clear that Pranee is also haunted by her own sense of guilt for something that turns out not to have been her fault after all but has, as the other boys say, turned her “weird”. The guilt that she feels has made her turn in on herself, become cold and repressed denying the boys the kind of maternal love and affection she appears to give them in flashbacks to her younger days. Chatree’s attempts to help Vichien are also attempts to liberate Pranee and himself from the limbo of the school and exorcise their traumas so that they may live again.

In Chatree’s case, his quest to help Vivhein is what allows him to make friends with the other boys, lifting the perpetual gloom of the school building and returning to him a sense of familial warmth that he felt that he had been denied in being exiled from his family. Though his resentment towards his father may in a sense ease, he does not seem to have forgiven him for his failures or transgressions but rather let his traditional family go in favour of friendship acknowledging that even the hardest times in life will soon pass if you have one close friend at your side. There are of course hints of queerness in the relationship between the two boys each of whom are in some way different and alike in their feelings of otherness and lack of belonging, while it may also in other ways explain Chatree’s father’s harshness towards him along with his preoccupation with traditional masculinity and obsession with academic success.

In that way unlike similarly themed nostalgia dramas, the school does not remain a purgatorial space and Chatree’s decision to remain within it is not an acceptance of limbo but of moving on in accepting himself and his identity and actively choosing a place to belong which is with his new friends rather than the repressive atmosphere of the traditional family as represented by his father. With shades of The Devil’s Backbone and Les Diaboliques, Songyos Sugmakanan conjures a gothic atmosphere of lingering dread but tempers it with humour and warmth in the genuine friendship between two lonely boys who in the end save each other and make what was once a prison a space of liberation.

Dorm is available as part of Umbrella Entertainment’s Thai Horror Boxset.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Ah Ying (半邊人, Allen Fong, 1983)

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“I want to make a film that reflects our time. If not, no one will ever know we existed,” frustrated filmmaker Cheung explains but finds himself hamstrung by the fact that he is not quite of this place by virtue of the fact that he is a Mandarin-speaking Mainlander who’s been living in the United States for several years. The old university friend who’s offered him this opportunity says as much, suggesting that in the end he doesn’t really understand Hong Kong while simultaneously failing to get a grip on his protagonist, a Hong Kong student in California.

It may be this sense of dislocation that Allen Fong’s Ah Ying is hinting at. Fong himself studied at UN Berkley before returning to Hong Kong and based the character of Cheung on a friend of his who died suddenly in the middle of working on a project. But the film is really about its title character, a young woman who longs to transcend the world she was born into and find a more independent destiny while held back by her needy mother and drunken father who run a fishmongers at the market where Ah Ying is expected to help out. We her clumsily gutting fish, ripping off half the meat while stripping the skin and inelegantly tearing out its viscera, only to leave abruptly in response to a slightly rude customer and the fact she can’t get through to her increasingly distant boyfriend, Hung, on the telephone.

Later we see Ying try to scrub the fish smell off her hands after running off to her part-time job at the Hong Kong Film Centre in which she does menial work in return for free acting classes taught by Cheung. She tells him that she doesn’t really know why she’s there, but she wants to try it out and maybe it will lead to a career. Cheung is a little insensitive in mentioning a girl he knew who wanted to be an actress in California, but she spends 11th months of the year working in a cocktail bar. Nevertheless, acting quite literally gives Ying the opportunity to be someone else and helps her to imagine a different future outside of her family’s lack of aspiration for her. 

Ying’s family are comparatively lucky in that they have two adjacent apartments, but Ying and her four siblings all live in one with her parents too, while her taxi-driver brother and his wife live next-door though Ying likes to hang out there and listen to records. Western music is another means of escape as she demonstrates by singing an a cappella version of Time in Bottle as part of Cheung’s acting class, though he hasn’t heard of any of the musicians she mentions like Brian Eno or David Bowie further marking him as out of touch with “our times”. They do, however, bond over Simon & Garfunkel’s version of Scarborough Fair with Cheung noting that it sounds just like Chinese opera. 

In order to further research his screenplay, Cheung talks Ying into arranging an interview with her by then ex-boyfriend Hung who breaks up with her for being too nice to him which he finds clingy and unpleasant even when she tells him she’s fine with him continuing to sleep with other girls. Though she continues to look back on her relationship with Hung, Ying has already signalled her desire to move on by getting rid of her perm as if marking a new transition into adulthood. Her mother is not, however, particularly happy about it as Ying is currently the only one of her several children prepared to help out at the fish stand. Ying’s mother clings to her like life raft as a means of sustaining herself in what is in many ways a dissatisfying of existence filled with constant toil to provide for her ungrateful family who look down on her occupation while her husband sleeps in a chair all day after drinking too much and barely helps at all.

Ying’s mother tells Cheung that she’ll be lost without her when she marries, but otherwise suggests she’d prefer her not to because she’d be left to cope with everything on her own. Cheung asks Ying why she doesn’t move out and she replies that it’s it the rent, her father only pays her pocket money for helping on the stand and she doesn’t earn anything at the film centre, though it’s unlikely a young woman on her own would be able to afford to rent in Hong Kong anyway. Cheung becomes a kind of lifeline to her, a mentor figure guiding her towards another kind of life but equally lost himself and a stranger in the contemporary city. Though she may develop feelings for him, his interest in her remains paternal and like the characters they play on stage any union between them will have to wait until the next life. Nevertheless, through her connection with him, she may have begun to discover her true self and become at last a whole person even if seemingly tethered to the fish stand. In the busy streets and cramped apartments, Fong may have succeeded in recording his times after all but also an unexpected sense of optimism and possibility in discovering new paths even if they ultimately lead to a parting.

Samurai Hustle Returns (超高速！参勤交代 リターンズ, Katsuhide Motoki, 2016)

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At the conclusion of 2014’s Samurai Hustle, it seemed that samurai corruption had been beaten back. Corrupt lord Nobutoki had got his comeuppance and the sympathetic “backwoods samurai” Naito was on his way home having found love along the way. Of course, nothing had really changed when it comes to the samurai order, but Naito was at least carving out a little corner of egalitarianism for himself in his rural domain. 

The aptly named Samurai Hustle Returns (超高速！参勤交代 リターンズ, Cho kosoku! Sankin kotai returns) picks up a month later with Naito (Kuranosuke Sasaki) taking a rather leisurely journey home in preparation for his marriage to Osaki (Kyoko Fukada) only to receive news that there has been a “rebellion” in Yunagaya. Predictably, this turns out to have been orchestrated by none other than Nobutoki who has been released early from his house arrest thanks to his close connections with the shogun but has been humiliated at court and is otherwise out for revenge with a slice of treasonous ambition tacked on for good measure. Just as in the first film, but in reverse, Naito and his retainers must try to rush home to get there before the imperial inspector arrives or else risk their clan being disbanded. 

Meanwhile, the shogun is absent at the wheel after having decided to resurrect an old tradition abandoned because of its expense and inconvenience to make a pilgrimage to Nikko. In an interesting parallel, the farmers are uncharacteristically upset with Naito, blaming him for the destruction of their fields because he wasn’t there to protect them. Naito also feels an additional burden of guilt given that, having run flat out all the way to Edo, he took his time coming back leaving his lands vulnerable to attack while he now risks losing the castle. Nobutoki wastes no time at all looking for various schemes to undermine him while secretly plotting to overthrow the shogun and usurp his position for himself. 

As in the first film, the battle is between samurai entitlement and the genial egalitarianism of Naito’s philosophy. “The real lords of Yunagaya are people like you who are one with the soil,” he tells the farmers, while Nobutoki sneers that “lineage rules supreme in this world, inherited wealth breeds more”. It doesn’t take a genius to read Nobutoki’s machinations as a reflection of his insecurity, that he invests so much in his rights of birth because he has no confidence in his individual talents. Naito counters that it’s the people around him that matter most, “people are priceless. Friends are priceless,” but Nobutoki rather sadly replies that people will always betray you in the end. Even the shogun eventually agrees that “anger brings enemies, forbearance brings lasting peace” but treats Nobutoki with a degree of compassion that may only embolden him in his schemes.

“Nepotism has endangered the shogunate,” the shogun ironically sighs apparently lacking in self-awareness even if beginning to see the problems inherent in the samurai society but presumably intending to do little about them. “No government should torment its people,” Naito had insisted on boldly deciding to retake his castle but even if this particular shogun is not all that bad, it’s difficult to deny that his rule is torment if perhaps more for petty lords like Naito than for ordinary people or higher-ranking samurai. Naito struggles to convince Osaki that she is worthy of his world and only finally succeeds in showing her that she has nothing prove and love knows nothing of class. The people of Yunagaya are impoverished but happy, satisfied with the simple charms of pickled daikon unlike the greedy Nobutoki whose internalised sense of inadequacy has turned dark and self-destructive. 

Then again, Naito is still a lord. He obeys the system out of love for his clan and a genuine desire to protect those around him but otherwise has little desire to change it actively even if his quiet acts of transgression in his closeness with the villagers and professions of egalitarianism are in their own way a kind of revolution in a minor rejection of the shogun’s authority to the extent that the time allows. Nevertheless, with his return journey he once again proves the ingenuity of a backwoods samurai getting by on his wits as he and his men race home to save their small haven of freedom from samurai oppression from the embodiment of societal corruption.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Samurai Hustle (超高速！参勤交代, Katsuhide Motoki, 2014)

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A kindhearted lord finds himself in deep trouble when he’s suddenly called back to Edo despite having just returned from his biennial service in Katsuhide Motoki’s jidaigeki comedy Samurai Hustle (超高速！参勤交代, Chokosoku! Sankin Kotai). Set in 1735, the film is in some senses unusual in pointing the various class biases even with the hierarchal samurai society as the tiny rural clan at the film’s centre are swept into intrigue by the machinations of an ambitious courtier who thinks they lied about their goldmine being extinct and plans to get his hands on it by dobbing them in to the Shogun.

The problem is that they really weren’t lying. The Yunagaya clan is dirt poor, especially after having spent a small fortune travelling to Edo and back. In this era, even distant lords were called to Edo every two years to serve at court. They were expected to parade to the capital in style, showing off their wealth and status as they go which is of course inordinately expensive. The expense was the point. Practices like these along with forcing clans to move domains on a whim were designed to weaken their resources so they’d have no recourse to rebellion even if they were even more annoyed about being forced to travel back and fore for no real reason. 

It took Lord Naito (Kuranosuke Sasaki) and his retinue 10 days to walk home, which is why it’s even more of a shock to get a letter telling them to high-tail it back in five or risk being dissolved by the shogun. Evil retainer Nobutoki (Takanori Jinnai) knows it’s impossible for them to arrive on time which is how he plans to get his hands on the gold. What he didn’t count on, however, is the unexpected scrappiness of a “backwoods samurai” who’s used to having to find ingenious solutions to difficult problems because he doesn’t have the money to solve them. Nobutoki is essentially a snob who looks down on country folk and thinks Naito does not befit the rank of a samurai anyway, sneering at his humble gift for the Shogun of some locally sourced daikon pickles. 

The homeliness of the daikon signals Naito’s down to earth nature as a fairly egalitarian samurai who doesn’t really care about hierarchy and status even if he knows he has to play the game. What he cares about is the safety and happiness of his people, which is one reason he’s going to bust his arse to get back to Edo and clear his name. Aside from his humanitarian principles, also giving away some of their rice stocks to neighbouring clans suffering during a time of famine, Naito is also thought of as an eccentric because of his severe claustrophobia which makes it impossible for him to close the door when using the bathroom, let alone travel in a palanquin, though he’s found an ingenious solution for that one too. 

In an odd kind of paradox, he becomes a defender to proper samurai values in his opposition to Nobutoki who plays fast and dirty, sending out ninja assassins on the road to try to ensure he won’t make it to Edo before the deadline. Meanwhile, he bonds with a feisty sex worker who, like him, is dealing with childhood trauma and is sick of entitled noblemen who look down on the poor despite being a fellow human who as she puts it poops and screws just like everyone else. In a way she frees him from the confines of his hierarchal existence by helping him overcome his claustrophobia, at least while she’s at his side, while he saves her from her oppression by transgressing class boundaries and bringing her into the samurai world if only as a concubine.

Nevertheless, as he warns her, being poor is hard even when you’re a samurai, and ironically his circumstances aren’t much better than hers even if he has a superficial level of comfort and security tempered by his genuine ability to appreciate the simple charms of daikon over fancy Edo cuisine. After all, sometimes samurai become peasants or peasants become samurai and for an impoverished lord like Naito the distinction is fairly thin, though he evidently does his best to protect those around him from both sides of the class divide while remaining unafraid to tell the Shogun exactly what he thinks of him. After all, you’ve got to roll with the times, especially if you’re a backwoods samurai at the mercy of a harsh and arbitrary system but also far enough away from the mechanisms of power to begin to ignore them. 

Trailer (no subtitles)

The Grand Grandmaster (乜代宗師, Dayo Wong, 2020)

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Are you actually “the grandmaster” or just a bit “grand”, the hero of The Grand Grandmaster (乜代宗師) is eventually forced to ask himself after being confronted with the various levels of his self-delusion. Legend has it that comedian Dayo Wong sold an apartment to finance his second directorial feature in order to produce a purely local film without having to submit himself to the strictures of the Mainland censors’ board or accept funding from the greater PRC, a move which endeared him to the young protestors then still out in the streets campaigning for democracy. The Grand Grandmaster was one of the few New Year films to make into cinemas before they shut down because of the pandemic but aside from Wong’s grand gesture is perhaps light on political content, save for a mild satire on the commercialisation of kung fu. 

The Grand Grandmaster, Ma Fe-lung (Dayo Wong Chi-Wah), is the latest guardian of the Ma Ka Thunder Style martial art apparently carried by one of his ancestors to Hong Kong from the Mainland during the Song dynasty. Ma Ka Thunder has since become something of a brand with its own dedicated merchandising line and video ads playing on giant billboards featuring Fei-lung himself as the face of the organisation. His hopes for US expansion along with his general business plan are disrupted when he gets into a public altercation with an old man who tries to steal his taxi and then makes a scene claiming that Fei-lung hit him leading Chan Tsang (Annie Liu Xin-You), the “boxing goddess”, to emerge from the shadows and give Fei-lung a public beating. Filmed by everyone in the surrounding area, the event becomes a viral phenomenon that leaves Fei-lung humiliated but while his minions urge him towards a public rematch to regain his reputation, Fei-lung is consumed with despair on realising there is no way he could ever hope to defeat the feisty young woman. 

Wong has fun satirising the lore of kung fu as Fei-lung outlines the strange tenets of the Ma Ka Thunder Style which turns out to make more sense that it first seems only generations of practitioners have it seems forgotten something quite fundamental. Fei-lung and his associates have to ask themselves if the art of Ma Ka is really just “fake fighting”, something suggested to Fei-lung by his loyal assistant who makes a point of overdoing his defeat and admits he only stays with the school because living outside is hard and here he gets room and board. Urged to show his full strength, he effortlessly defeats his master but only by abandoning Thunder Style for a selection of moves from other martial arts. 

The remainder of the film sees Fei-lung trying to “dodge” Tsang, firstly by trying to bribe her to throw the fight for him and then by convincing her to get more “comfortable” with the idea of losing. Events take a rather strange turn when Tsang’s dad gets involved and starts training Fei-lung for real in an effort to get back at his daughter for quitting boxing after a single defeat apparently humiliating him in another nod to the film’s strangely sexist worldview. Tsang bizarrely falls for Fei-lung after witnessing the depths of his self-delusion in his complex relationship with his ex-wife, building to a crisis which accidentally makes a case for domestic violence in insisting that Tsang will only believe that Fei-lung really loves her if he defeats her in the ring. 

Nevertheless, the conclusion is an oddly egalitarian one in which there is no win, no lose, no draw. Fei-lung realises the various ways in which he’s been deluding himself and presumably emerges with a little more clarity, awakened to the true meaning of the “virtue like water” motto of Ma Ka Thunder Style which apparently lies in generosity of spirit, giving without expecting in return and like water trickling down. Which is to say, Fei-lung learns to stop dodging life’s blows, to give up on tricks and fakery, and to be a little more authentic, which is perhaps how he wins Tsang’s heart and respect. A committed performance from Liu helps to mitigate some otherwise flat comedy though the saga of the kung fu con man rediscovering his sense of social responsibility through a true appreciation of martial arts never quite hits home, while a strange mid-credits diversion perhaps proves one move too far.

Trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

Yadang: The Snitch (야당, Hwang Byeng-gug, 2025)

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A Korean prosecutor can make or break a president, according to the ambitious Ku (Yoo Hae-jin) making a final power play to put an arrogant chaebol son in his place. But Ku isn’t trying to make a stand for the rule of law so much as bend it to his own will while securing his position, because in the world of Yadang: The Snitch (야당) justice is largely illusionary while mediated through the complex interplay between the social and political elite, crime, and law enforcement.

The hero, Kang-su (Kang Ha-neul), makes this plain in explaining that the big drug busts that get the police into the papers are largely all orchestrated through the snitchery of yadang like himself, a set up in which low-level drug users are encouraged to become police informants in return for lenient sentences allowing the detectives to take care of the dealers. Perhaps that’s all very well, as detective Sang-jae (Park Hae-joon) says, there’s no point locking up hundreds of users because the supply is endless and it makes no difference to the business. Kang-su’s likening of them cockroaches is a little problematic, even if he has a point that if you want to get rid of the infestation you have to go in for the nest.

But it turns out the nest is in an unexpected place because the nexus of corruption is in the government and political system which has been infiltrated by wealthy businessmen looking to further their own ambitions through politics while their feckless children behave like princelings knowing they can do whatever they want and then ring their fathers to make whatever consequences might occur go away. Though the film doesn’t go too deeply into it, there is something in the fact that both Ku and Kang-su come from poor, single-parent families though the direction of their ambitions might be quite different. Ku has studied hard to become a prosecutor and escape his poverty, but has only 10 years to make it into the top ranks or be forced to resign. He exploits Kang-su’s desire for wealth and agency to help him achieve his ambitions but though he describes him as a brother, is all too ready to throw him under the bus once he’s no longer useful to him. 

For his part, Kang-su relishes his role within this ironic system as someone on the fringes of crime but also facilitating law enforcement without being manipulated by the police in the same way that their informants often are. Sang-jae swears to protect a young actress after picking her up in a bust if she helps him catch the kingpins but in the end he can’t do it, partly because of Ku, but also because at the end of the day his fellow officers have the same opinion of their snitches as Ku does his and aren’t terribly invested in their safety or wellbeing. After getting caught up in Ku’s showboating raid on a hotel where chaebol son Hoon is partying with yakuza drug dealers, Su-jin’s (Chae Won-bin) career is ruined and on her release she has only the drug scene to rely on with the consequence that she becomes an addict and a dealer herself.

But it was Hoon (Ryu Kyung-soo) that made her a user in the first place by spiking a drink and then went on to use his privilege to control her and make sure that she stayed within his orbit. Ambitious men like Ku make their deals and let the chaebol sons get away with their crimes, though his late in the game attempt to remind Hoon that he could ruin his father’s chances of becoming Korea’s next president if he chose to implies his own sense of worthiness that he is actually above this illusionary elite though he may be overestimating his reach. These three branches of branches of power operate in a symbiotic system and need each other to survive. Ku is only really a kind of Yadang himself, mediating between a social and political elite while enjoying only the illusion of power and independence. Hwang ups the action stakes with some high impact set pieces including that in which Kang-su uses the brute force of his Hummer to literally bulldoze a car full of drug dealers while the police chase after them with metal poles, but seems to suggest the real violence stems from the system if ultimately opting for an ironic buddy cop conclusion in which Kang-su uses his considerable skills in a more legitimate fashion.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Sasori in U.S.A. (Daisuke Goto, 1997)

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An attempt to reboot the Female Prisoner Scorpion series for V-cinema had stalled in the early ‘90s when the then star of Death Threat abruptly pulled out of a sequel that was to be a production with Hong Kong’s Golden Harvest. In 1997, however, Nami Matsushima was once again resurrected only this time as a US co-production with most of the film shot in Los Angeles and in a mix of Japanese and English. 

Relocating the franchise overseas is in some ways surprising given that the first film of the original series opened with the national anthem and shots of the Japanese flag. It was explicitly clear that they were talking primarily about the social conditions of Japan in the 1970s. Likewise, Sasori in U.S.A. seems to walk back on some of the themes of patriarchal oppression that informed the previous instalments preferring instead to refocus on themes such as racism, the failure of the American Dream, and the powerlessness of living under a cruel and arbitrary foreign power, which is an entirely contrary perspective to the earlier film’s attempts at critiquing corruption with Japan itself. 

It’s never really made clear why Jiro (Tetta Sugimoto) and Nami (Yoko Saito) are in the US in the first place, though Nami’s sympathetic journalist friend implies that Jiro came there to make his fortune only to become frustrated with the limits of the American Dream. This Nami is a well-paid interior designer, at least according to her prison file, if one completely in thrall to Jiro whom she met in the US an unspecified amount of time previously. When Jiro is killed by a car bomb, Nami ends up being arrested for his murder because she stood to gain 1.2 million dollars by his death (though they appeared to have a very comfortable life to begin with, so it’s not clear why she’d take such drastic action). Apparently too traumatised to defend herself, Nami failed to hire a proper lawyer or fight her case and has not launched an appeal but spends all her time vowing revenge, which of course means she has to escape from prison. 

That might be a minor problem for the film, which is to some extent in its marketing selling itself as a women in prison picture. This is indeed the most exploitative of the films so far with a salacious shower scene and titivating moments of touching and kissing each other, while Nami is also harassed by an obnoxious blonde prisoner who seems to be running the cell block while in cahoots with the sadistic warden who, as this is America, is incredibly religious and forever quoting from the Bible while raping his inmates. Nami eventually stabs him in the eye in what may be an homage to the original series. 

Nevertheless, Nami soon escapes in the company of another prisoner who is second generation Japanese-American and has been blind since birth. Like Nami, Yukiko (Shizuka Ochi) also has a mission of revenge against the American hoodlums who raped her and shot her Dominican boyfriend Dino to death. Though the narrative actually has almost nothing to do with Female Prisoner Scorpion, the twist will be very obvious to anyone familiar with the series as Nami has indeed been betrayed by a man she thought loved her. Discovering Jiro may have been embezzling money and in fact knocking off the lawyers who tried to sue the car company he worked for for making defective cars rather than being knocked off by them, Nami is forced to reckon with the illusionary quality of her American success story. Jiro meanwhile rails about entrenched racism and unfairness, decrying the police and justice system as “insane” which they well might be or at least in their treatment of Nami. Broken by the failure of his American Dream, he becomes a pitiful and tragic figure.

Even so, Nami’s revenge remains a personal affair rather than an all out attack on a corrupt and oppressive social order ruled by misogyny and male failure. Though the production values are perhaps a little higher than one might expect and the direction leaning towards the artier side with its blue-tinted eroticism, shower scenes aside, the film remains very much of its time and has very little in common with the Female Prisoner Scorpion franchise save its women in prison elements and a late allusion to an actual scorpion. It is though interesting for its perspective on the American Dream and America in general as a place of greed, violence, and intensely hypocritical religious fanaticism.