Author: Doug Cummings

Jun Ichikawa’s Tony Takitani is an elegant little film, and one of the most emotionally resonant movies I’ve seen this year. Based on a story by the popular Japanese author Haruki Murakami that was published in the New Yorker in 2002, the characters and narrative are so lightly sketched, the film’s gravity sneaks up on the viewer, largely through the gradual force of its form and rhythm.

The film opens by evoking the carefree lifestyle of Tony Takitani’s father, Shozaburo, a jazz musician who lives in Shanghai during World War II, endures prison, returns to Japan and marries, but becomes …

In this age of global communication, we think of the world as getting smaller, but then a documentary like the BBC’s A State of Mind (distributed theatrically in the US by Kino International) comes along and offers a glimpse into one of the most industrialized but closed societies on earth, and it’s like discovering life on another planet. North Korea, whose war with South Korea has remained in a cease fire for the last half century, is a totalitarian state that bans international mail, travel, and cell phones, offers one official television and radio station, and only admits a trickle …