Decried as an offensive trivialization of trans reassignment surgery by GLAAD as soon its premise was announced, Walter Hill’s Re(Assignment) makes the subtextual defense for itself early on. Institutionalized for two years, surgeon Rachel Ray (Sigourney Weaver) — a formerly respected practitioner stripped of her license — is being questioned by a shrink (Tony Shalhoub) as to why four corpses were found in her illicit medical officet. Ray was performing gender reassignment surgery on the willing and unwilling, but she wasn’t just a doctor, she insists; she was also an artist, and — quoting Edgar Allan Poe — declares that proper art is […]

The only American narrative in Berlinale’s Competition selection this year was Midnight Special, Jeff Nichols’s cryptic homage to utopian sci-fi and early Spielbergian iconography, and something of a return to the more fantastical genre territory seen in his breakout, Take Shelter. In the film, which reportedly had a budget of $18 million and tends to look like it cost ten times that, Roy (Michael Shannon) and Lucas (Joel Edgerton) are on the lam in Texas following their apparent kidnapping of a young boy named Alton (Jaeden Lieberher), a “special child” coveted by the CIA, cultish rural religious organizations, and other […]

KYÔKO KOIZUMI, INOWAKI KAI, TERUYUKI KAGAWA, AND YÛ KOYANAGI IN DIRECTOR KIYOSHI KUROSAWA’S TOKYO SONATA. COURTESY REGENT RELEASING. Over the past decade or so, Kiyoshi Kurosawa has established himself as one of the most interesting genre directors in world cinema. The Japanese writer-director was born in Kobe in 1955, and first made 8mm shorts while studying Sociology at Rikko University. He began directing features in the early 1980s, working on direct-to-video titles, including yakuza movies, and studied under the tutelage of directors Shinji Somai and Kazuhiko Hasegawa. He then had minor successes with films like the college-set drama The Excitement […]